Metagamenp: SS DOU stage 0: Begin Again | Beat Up banned

Go to page

Go to page

**hypnotic recorder plays in background**

I’ve made this point on discord but posting it here as well to make it available.

I agree with what Stratos said above that such a quick unban should not be done by the council. This gets more apparent when the actual reasoning to why this is unbanned had no mention of what would be the prevalent abusers (goth and clops).At this point I woulr agree with Stratos that its time to admit an oversight in the decision and undo it, possibly leaving it to a community suspect test.

What I really disagree with is using a council vote and 2 weeks of apathy as a vote of confidence in this unban and placing the onus on the community rather than the council to undo the decision. Council action has almost universally been reserved for decisive action on clearly broken aspects of the format early in said format (magearna, zyg c). Using the council vote to undo a previous clause because it probably wont make a difference is not how council votes should be used, especially when proven to have been hastily made (not acknowledging gothitelle’s potential). If hypnograv is healthy and we’re all wrong, put it to a suspect test and let people voice their opinion.

Reban hypnograv and suspect test it if you truly believe it’s a fine addition to the metagame

panic on the brain

First things first, removing GravSleep Clause was a fine decision at the time. We had little reason to believe it would be oppressive, and it is true that one of our goals is to make the banlist minimal while still maintaining a healthy metagame. Removing a clause that appeared to have little to no relevance seemed like it would meet those goals, so we made a decision to remove the clause with the stipulation that we would be fast to revisit it if necessary (more on this later). What we definitely could have done better is communicate. There was almost no discussion in this thread regarding GravSleep clause before its removal, as most of it took place on Discord if I recall correctly. That is something the council is aware of and will work to fix going forward.

When GravSleep was freed, this was the exact wording from talkingtree's post:

If in the future this proves to be an issue again, the council will act swiftly in restoring this clause and possibly figuring out how to handle Orbeetle, but for now we're expecting this change to have minimal impact on the metagame.

The inclusion of Gmax Orbeetle in this clause does increase the complexity of the clause but is a necessary evil; if we are to ban something, the council believes we must cover all instances.

The plan going forward is to evaluate the metagame over the coming weeks to determine what the potentially problematic elements are, either with or without the inclusion of GravSleep. Whatever the general consensus, the result will very likely be a suspect test. I really liked what miltankmilk said about the burden of proof being on the council as to why GravSleep should be legal as opposed to it being on the people who didn't make the decision as to why it should remain banned. If we decide down the road that we want to reexamine GravSleep, it will be in the form of a suspect test that would required a 60% vote to unban as usual. If we decide that something else could be done about a different aspect of the metagame, we would likely suspect that instead. The general timeline for such a suspect would be such that SPL XI is not affected by the result.

In the meantime, we'd like to encourage further discussion, especially here on the forums. The council never wants to make decisions without consulting public opinion first, which was likely our main mistake with the freeing of GravSleep. Posting your thoughts in this thread is the best way to make sure your opinion is heard, as even though discussion on Discord is great for real time conversation, it's much harder to catch up on live conversations and forum posts tend to be much more organized by nature.

A quick note on OHKO Clause: it's not going anywhere. Any further discussion of it would just be a waste of energy, as the council does not see any need whatsoever to release OHKO moves into the metagame.

Thanks for bearing with us, our goal is the same as yours: to play some doubles and have some fun. Hopefully we can all work together to get there.

A quick note on OHKO Clause: it's not going anywhere. Any further discussion of it would just be a waste of energy, as the council does not see any need whatsoever to release OHKO moves into the metagame.

The general power level of Doubles OU just skyrocketed. Dragon Dance Icicle Spear Kyurem-Black is ready to claim kills while Dynamaxed, Follow Me Jirachi is back to check Togekiss and reclaim its glory as the best Follow Me Pokemon, the stat-stealing Marshadow is back with an absurd Speed tier, and the ubiquitous Incineroar is back to attempt to slow down some of these monsters. Not to mention the fact that Mew gets access to oldgen moves again (e.g. Tailwind), old Hidden Abilities are once again legal, and significantly more Pokemon have received massive updates to their movesets overall. Having access to a greater pool of Pokemon with higher base stat totals is going to shift the metagame entirely in significant ways, and I expect the Doubles OU we played last week to be starkly different than the DOU we play next week.

I deeply disagree with the idea of quickbanning Jirachi. There is a lot of what we don't know about how the future format, but certainly there aren't many reasons to think Jirachi would be so broken this generation that it doesn't deserve a suspect or even a week playing in the metagame. Dragapult and Arcanine are the two most popular pokemon (with the former being arguably the strongest attacker in the tier), Excadrill sand is one of the most common playstyles, so is Torkoal Trick Room. Looking at the new pokemon introduced we can see two very strong counters it's going to have in Incineroar and Marshadow, while the only pokemon it's going to be walling are going to be Venusaur and Melmetal. Now I'm not saying it doesn't have the potential to be broken, in fact I'm sure it's going to be an S tier pokemon right from the beginning. My problem lies with us deciding not to allow it right away, having no knowledge of how the format is going to like and without giving the right to vote on it for the players themselves. In previous generations we have allowed it for long periods of time, despite it being centralizing and good to use. Now we have a lot of ways to counter it, yet we aren't going even to give it a try? I understand that with SPL going on it's important to keep the format stable, but we can't let that alone guide our decision-making. There have been many SPL tournaments with Jirachi being legal and none of them seemed to suffer from it, the games were still good and the teams diverse. Marshadow turned out to be as centralizing in the SM metagame, yet no one is arguing we should get rid of it immediately. I will support a Jirachi suspect as soon as we get a better idea of how it does in the current format, but for the moment I would be strongly against making it illegal, before we even play one game.

Aside from the formerly banned mons + Kyurem there are some interesting additions.
Weakness Policy Necrozma looks like a very powerful offensive Trick Room setter. Opposing Snarl/ Struggle Bug will also proc Necrozma's Weakness Policy. It also gets Autotomise with a base 79 speed tier if you want to go fast. With Prism Armor it can survive very strong super effective hits, especially when Dynamaxed.

Zeraora looks like it may be able to shine in this meta with few good electric types and it outspeeds Dragapult by 1 point. Melmetal's 51% flinch rate Double Iron Bash is going to make Trick Room annoying to deal with, especially considering its power.

Beat Up may be ready to make a comeback to the days of the pre speed mechanics era of SWSH. Terrakion (and possibly Virizion and Cobalion) is our new Justified user with better bulk, power and speed than Arcanine. The meta has adjusted so that more teams will naturally have checks to Beat Up with Togekiss and Indeedee as common Follow Me users and SWSH speed mechanics provide more options to disrupt Beat Up teams, so we will have to wait and see how well Beat Up can deal with the rest of the meta. As with Arcanine Dynamax will make Terrakion very difficult to KO, especially when its STAB Max Rockfall will boost its Spdef via Sandstorm. Kee Berry and Max Steelspike are potential options to boost defence as well.

Parting Shot Incineroar will be particularly threatening paired with Gothitelle but it seems that people aren't too convinced it will replace U-Turn on other teams. I think that stat drops against opposing Dynamaxed mons are a solid case for running Parting Shot over U-Turn, especially considering Fake Out may pressure your opponent to Dynamax in front of Incineroar.

I actually agree with frania's post. We should see how the meta develops before quickbanning jirachi. In fact, imo the more broken one is marhshadow. It can now even loot dmax boosts which is stupid. If anything, we should be quickbanning marshadow than jirachi.

Dragapult and Arcanine are the two most popular pokemon (with the former being arguably the strongest attacker in the tier), Excadrill sand is one of the most common playstyles, so is Torkoal Trick Room. Looking at the new pokemon introduced we can see two very strong counters it's going to have in Incineroar and Marshadow, while the only pokemon it's going to be walling are going to be Venusaur and Melmetal.

Fullroom is just as obnoxious in Gen6/7, with Hoopa / Mega Camerupt countering Rachi

But Jirachi still got banned in both.

Jirachi usually earns you 2 free turns. This gen, those turns are far more valuable because of the Power of Dynamax.

Now imagine with a tier with literally weaker Pokemon and redirection is stronger. It is absurd to think that Jirachi would be able to stay in the Sword and Shield DOU metagame long-term. Same goes for Marshadow in Lando / Fini / Amoong-less Metagame. I would not mind if Jirachi is to avoid a quickban, I like using it and I personally don't care if its "messing up the tier" unless something really RNG based got freed or degenerate got freed. Jirachi is obviously broken but I can use it too and there is skill expressed in using it.

I just think it's a genuine waste of time to suspect it, it's obviously going to be banned. And, it just seems like a biased opinion to quickban Marshadow and not Jirachi. We should be fair to Marshadow by not hitting it with a Quickban, either.

How about this super smart idea, don't ban anything tell all the dlc mons are released. Don't do the sun and moon bullshit of banning than having another suspect test for unbanning that same mon because it got banned before all the mons were released.

Last gen if marshadow, jirachi, snorlax where all available at the same time I don't think either one of them would have got banned. same for mega gengar also. They all counter each other, you prematurely banned one of the counters and broke the balance of everything.

Don't ruin gen 8. still like 200 mons that are coming and new legendarys/max mons.

The proposed changes would introduce 5 mons with comfortable S-rank potential at once, I'm not sure how we should go about them, but I would not be very comfortable with this in the middle of bloody SPL.

They can all be retested in the future if we think they won't be problematic, but for the time being I would prioritize making sure that SPL doesn't turn into a shitshow and taking some safe quickbans here - Rachi and Marshadow for sure, and take long hard looks at Kyu-B, Melmetal, and maybe even Incineroar.

If this pool of mons was released at the start of the generation I would have agreed with taking it slow and giving every pokemon a shot. Unfortunately we're bang in the middle of the most important team tournament on Smogon and I think making some more aggressive guesses on what will and won't be broken in order to protect SPL is the right way to go

The proposed changes would introduce 5 mons with comfortable S-rank potential at once, I'm not sure how we should go about them, but I would not be very comfortable with this in the middle of bloody SPL.

They can all be retested in the future if we think they won't be problematic, but for the time being I would prioritize making sure that SPL doesn't turn into a shitshow and taking some safe quickbans here - Rachi and Marshadow for sure, and take long hard looks at Kyu-B, Melmetal, and maybe even Incineroar.

If this pool of mons was released at the start of the generation I would have agreed with taking it slow and giving every pokemon a shot. Unfortunately we're bang in the middle of the most important team tournament on Smogon and I think making some more aggressive guesses on what will and won't be broken in order to protect SPL is the right way to go

Than ban them in your stupid tournaments, don't make us ladder players suffer. The decisions of banning should not only be had with the idea of tournaments in mind that the majority of the player base does not participate in. Your "important tournament" is not important to the majority of the players that play ladder.

Like ships in the night, you're passing me by

Jirachi has been somewhere between game breaking and outright broken in metagames where you only had a few common set up mons you would see run alongside.

I don’t see how it’s even in question that it would be broken in a meta where literally any of its teammates can turn into a potentially problematic setup sweeper and where the sweeper has so much bulk that spread moves don’t dent it.

- OTL

I think it's a good idea that we should instantly unban everything that has got banned this gen when the new DLC comes out but saying that we shouldn't ban shit in the first place and just deal with a suck-ass meta until november makes no sense

Than ban them in your stupid tournaments, don't make us ladder players suffer. The decisions of banning should not only be had with the idea of tournaments in mind that the majority of the player base does not participate in. Your "important tournament" is not important to the majority of the players that play ladder.

Oh yeah I'm sure you'll be suffering without pokemon that are borderline broken to begin with.

Ladder players will be mildly inconvenienced if we accidentally quickban something that could have remained unbanned for a month or two. Tournament players will be fucking ruined if we accidentally don't ban something that should be. This would be so majorly disruptive to the tournament scene that the effects it will have on ladder are negligible in this specific case.

I'm all for taking decisions with ladder in mind, but I can't overstate how bad it would be to see even more weeks of SPL ruined by headass policy decisions after the whole GravSleep fiasco. Please please please give us a playable metagame to close out SPL first, figure out if maybe we can free some 700 BST demigod after.

the real n1n1

I agree with Red Pill PUA here. Making an important decision for the sake of a few people and a few tour matches at the expense of everyone else is extremely selfish.

This is a significant drop of new mons. We should treat this with the same respect as a new meta and not rush into a hasty decision. Remember at the start of gen7 you had TFC, an SPL player, making a similar argument for quick banning skymin. We have done a good job of not acting in haste and shouldn't start now.

Like margana and zygarde complete got 2 fair weeks of battles before quick ban. Jirachi or w/e you think is broken deserve the same treatment, regardless of what ever tour is happening.

I agree with Red Pill PUA here. Making an important decision for the sake of a few people and a few tour matches at the expense of everyone else is extremely selfish.

This is a significant drop of new mons. We should treat this with the same respect as a new meta and not rush into a hasty decision. Remember at the start of gen7 you had TFC, an SPL player, making a similar argument for quick banning skymin. We have done a good job of not acting in haste and shouldn't start now.

Like margana and zygarde complete got 2 fair weeks of battles before quick ban. Jirachi or w/e you think is broken deserve the same treatment, regardless of what ever tour is happening.

I disagree. Whining about any bans for the coming year "because more mons will be added" sounds like crazy-talk. I actually agree with stratos's midground opinion in freeing things WHEN the full DLC is released, but twiddling your thumbs "because more stuff will be released anyways"? Why do we ever ban things in Pokemon anyways, Gen 9 is coming out in a few more years anyways, why do you care? The funniest part is that PUA is gonna bitch about council being corrupt for not banning Incineroar in 3 weeks if we were to actually not ban anything.

Magearna and Zygarde-Complete were Pokemon that were completely unavailable in previous generations. It would be facetious to say we knew exactly how broken it was when we didn't even know how Z moves and other basic game interaction worked. We had experience dealing with Skymin from previous generations, and thus we were able to make the correct decision. This is a false comparison and is not good logic.

We know a lot about Dynamax now. We know what game elements are stronger. Jirachi has those elements and was broken in a stronger meta where said elements were not as easily abusable.

My take would be quickbanning Jirachi and Marshadow, 2 clearly broken game elements we know from past experience. I would be quite against quickbanning Melmetal without letting them see play. Quickbanning Incineroar sounds pretty far out there unless you're PUA.

I think we can all agree that Kyub--broken or not--should be considered an uber due to BST and tested down later if need be.

Incin and Melmetal seem like they should have a place in the current meta and I don't think anyone is arguing they go on the chopping block yet.

For Marshadow and Jirachi,
I think these mons should be suspected tested down ASAP, but considered uber to start.

I don't think there is a precedent for this, but in the interest of appeasing both the general playerbase who want to experiment and see these new additions for themselves and the tour players who don't want to figure out an entirely new metagame in 4-5 days, I think this is a good way to go.

The council could have a rule/tradition/official smogon legislation that on a case-by-case basis, mons banned in a previous generation can be tested down (one at a time if you want? or both) instead of released immediately. Jirachi and Marshadow would be guaranteed a chance in the game without tour players having to navigate the treacherous waters of busted ass mons in a limited time frame.

I think it's a good idea that we should instantly unban everything that has got banned this gen when the new DLC comes out but saying that we shouldn't ban shit in the first place and just deal with a suck-ass meta until november makes no sense

For the record, I believe we shouldn’t quick ban anything. I’d rather us do a suspect test. As for SPL, the mons that are considered broken should be illegal until the tournament ends so that it isn’t affected by the changes. Kyurem-B should be Uber based solely on BST. We all thought Snorlax would be broken again, but it turned out not to be. Let’s give all the new mons a chance. Also, Beat Up should probably go. I feel like it is uncompetitive. Same for Swagger and Spectral Thief. I really don’t wanna lose Marshadow because of one move only it can learn.

Regardless of what Ladder Players™️ think, SPL is the most important tournament on Smogon. PS ladder is important, yes, but tournament integrity of SPL for the next month is of utmost importance. SPL wouldn't be the best tournament if, halfway through, the metagame became completely uncompetitive for 2 weeks just so ladder players can have their fun (especially since their fun is merely delayed). Note that this is Smogon, not PS!, so decisions should be made in the interests of Smogon, which involves to a very large degree promoting SPL as a worthwhile tournament to participate in and take seriously.

With that said, if Everyone On The Ladder™️ disagreed with me, I would be open to changing my mind, but as it stands,Red Pill PUA merely says that he stands for Everyone On The Ladder™️, and I have no reason to believe his opinion.

With regards to having the ladder meta and spl meta be different--I am indifferent to this suggestion, but it is my belief that the meta should be the same for ladder and tournaments so anyone who wants to play in a tournament can practice on ladder. That would mean that I think the rules should be the same for SSnls, SPL, and the ladder.

Finally, I think that once SPL is done, or at least on to top 4, we just drop all the quickbanned mons that were not quickbanned in previous generations (rachi, marsh, Kyub, beat up, whatever) and run suspect tests on them then. Saying 'fuck SPL' so Red Pill PUA can play 2 games a week with Jirachi for 3 more weeks seems very silly to me.

P.S.: ban beat up, I really don't wanna find out that it's broken halfway through my game next week

For the record:
Marshadow and Snorlax were simultaneously free at one point. It was the suspect test before Snorlax, so why would anyone think it was a good idea to free it, when it was JUST banned?

Same for Mega Gengar. Marshadow -> Snorlax -> Mega Gengar 1 -> Mega Gengar 2. There was talks of re-freeing Marshadow before Mega Gengar's 2nd suspect test, but doing so with the highly tense atmosphere back then would have been a huge mistake. Also what would freeing Jirachi have done for Mega Gengar other than make its bustedness even more pronounced?

The only point you brought up that was even relevant was the Rachi-Marshadow interaction.

Also while I don't think anyone wants to play in a metagame where something is clearly broken until the full DLC is released, I do think it's weird to quickban without giving stuff a fair shot, considering how long it takes to unban something. Precedence shows its a lot harder to unban something that isn't broken (look how long it took for a Skymin re-test, look how long it took for Marshadow re-suspect looking for a good timing.) I know a lot of it is trying to minimize the impact and in good faith, but quickbanning something without sufficient evidence showing it's broken, then fighting an uphill battle to give it a fair shot is equally unwelcoming.

I appreciate how PUA dishonestly tries to twist the narrative with literal fake news so that Snorlax is "only banned because Marshadow is banned." I hardly think it is the case.

As someone who did really well in the Marsh-Lax metagame (I believe i got the best DOU record in SSD1 when this meta was current), Marshadow actually failed to completely counter Snorlax and there were plenty of instances that a Marshadow teammate helped Snorlax much more than an opposing Marshadow hurt it - once Curselax gets a Curse boost, it often forced Marshadow to sacrifice itself to do 60% to Lax which it recovered straightaway with its Berry. With their Marshadow gone, your Marshadow pressuring OHKOs next to it provided more Curse / Recycle turns. Metagame isn't as simple as type advantages, unfortunately.

This took as long as it did because generally people don't want to mess with oldgens legality.

Then how about this? The council announces a schedule for suspect tests to reintroduce these Pokemon to the metagame, and will be held accountable. Subjecting people to a full year of broken metagame because of some council boogeyman is really a waste of time for everyone involved.